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Searching for the Oldest Running Application
A columnist from InternetWeek has completed a search for the oldest running commercial software application. His results are interesting (note that he's mostly skipping over mainframe applications, just looking at PC-based apps).
Don't mean to be nitpicky, but if you'd bothered to read the whole article you'd have noticed that he mentioned a mainframe program called DATAMOD that dates back to October 1971, which is over 30 years ago. As the main focus of his article was PC applications, however, his article did not give much information on mainframe apps.
Dude... its time to upgrade! Scorched 3D complete with an OpenGL renderer!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Lotus 123 seems to the job quite well for his dad, so why should he change hundreds of options to customize his excel to do the same for a lot of more money?
Having a lot of options does not necessarily mean that a program is better suited for a problem than a simple one...
SyncSort was the first useful sort program to break the O(N log N) barrier (yes, this is possible, CS101 kiddies). This was a huge win for mainframe shops with their big tape-to-tape sort jobs. That's what all those spinning tape reels were doing on early computers. SyncSort cut days off some batch jobs.
You can buy current versions of SyncSort. The old versions for IBM mainframes are still available, and you can get it as an Active-X control for Windows. So that's a 34-year old product, little changed in decades and still doing a useful job today.
I did maintenance programming on a competitive product, UNIVAC Exec II Sort/Merge, around 1969. SyncSort was faster. They really did have a better, and patented, algorithm.
Ok I was going to use my final moderator point on this but i found far too many offtopics for me to do it. I do belive the longets running application they are looking for is the LONGEST STILL RUNNING from start to today. Like uptime but just a single application. :)
There was reciently the longest running computer hunt and now i suppose they want the longest running application. Im sure its going to be a database or a print or file server of some kind but you never know, someone may still have Word running and they never quit it on their dos machine 10 years ago
I'm sure theres still really old applications in use today but its unlikely they have been running all this time.
People, Please read the article before you chose to reply.
... named CornerStone ... written by the people at InfoGames ...
Almost - written by Infocom, the writers of many excellent text adventures, such as Zork.
IIRC They bought this from Sub-logic. I still have the original box at home. 5.25 for the Apple ][.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
Have you tried 7zip yet? Freeware and handles long file names in dos + has a nice gui version that will handle rar, zip, and lots others.
Steven V.
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
The oldest telephone number in consistent use is "0" for operator
That would be Infocom Cornerstone. The point was that since Infocom had experience in getting their games to run on many micro platforms, that could leverage that technology into making business products that also ran identically on many platforms. CS was not an internal tool--it was always intended as a product.
Unfortunately, they underestimated the knowledge of *business apps* that would be necessary to make this work, and the extra costs of expanding the company for this development eventually overwhelmed them. Today we know that the technology for a single development platform that is itself retargeted to host systems can be a product in and of itself. That might have been a way for Infocom to have avoided such a deep commitment to the business environment, although even that road has its share of wrecks.
Excel's default behavior is to use relative references. Are you using the correct terminology? If you copy a calculation from one cell in excel to another it will use a relative reference for the calculation.
Excel also does absolute references...you just put a $ in front of the column and row number (i.e. a1 becomes $a$1).
>>and find the oldest continually running app...
It just might turn out to be a copy of Novell server
A friend of mine works for Novell, one of their clients had an IBM server running Novell (I don't know which version) that had not been rebooted in almost EIGHT years. That's no power outages, no crashes, nothing. Says a lot about both the software and the hardware.
This definately is not the oldest running software, as it was written only a few months ago, but it surely makes old hardware useful in a "modern" sense: The Contiki desktop OS for 80's 8-bit microcomputers like the C64, the 8-bit Ataris, Apple ][, etc. It features a full Internet suite, complete with TCP/IP stack, web browser and web server! Wonder what the world would have looked like if we'd had software like this back then...
The situation I always like to bring up is libraries. A perfectly aceptable method for doing research that worked for year and years was card catalogues and physically searching through journals. You can still do it, there is no reason why it doesn't work. However, it is MUCH more efficient to have a computer do the search for you, and better still if the whole journal is electronic so you can do full text searches, and just download the article straight to your computer.
Our university has done this. The physical card catalogue has been completely eliminated, all searches are electronic now. Also, while there are still floors of physical journals, many of the popular ones are available in PDF format for download.
It is amazing how much more efficient it makes research. It's even better because I can tie it in to databases of things that aren't even contained in this particular library.
Some times people get so caught up in the fact that the way they do something "works just fine" that they miss the fact that there is a much more efficient way to do it.
Hi. Second-world refers to, or at least used to refer to, the Soviet bloc. Third-world was a term used for countries that were neither allied with the Soviets nor members of NATO. Just thought you'd like to know.
Mice don't slow you down when you are typing 120 wpm, so that's not the reason. Legal/Medical types use WP5.1 for one of three reasons, and none of them have to do with speed.
1) Their documents have have less formatting than this slashdot post. All 10pt double-spaced Courier. The medical types don't even bother with pucntuation sometimes.
2) They've got macros that they bought 10 years ago that won't convert. WP even sold a document managment system at one time.
3) Those two industries are notorious tightasses. Yes, they will run WP to the end of time just to avoid spending $1K on a new computer.
Apropos of the Leo mentioned in a previous slashdot story.
I saved this post from alt.folklore.computers in 1998. Terribly impressive. I'm not sure his age estimate is neccessarily accurate -- the final incarnation of the Leo ceased to be manufactured in the latter half of the 60s, so it may be a bit younger.
On the other hand, I wouldn't put it past some organization having been forced to make something like the orange leo y2k compliant.
Yours Truly,
Jeffrey Boulier
From: Deryk Barker (dbarker@camosun.bc.nospam.ca)
Subject: Re: Multics
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, alt.os.multics
Date: 1998/11/09
Peter H. Coffin (hellsop@execpc.com) wrote:
: Barry Margolin wrote:
:
: > For that matter, how many portable OSes have been implemented by *anyone*?
:
: The most current OS/400 (v4r3) will still run programs compiled on the
: System 38 tranparently. That's 10-15 year old object code over at least
: one complete architecture change. The machine also has a history of
: being able to run in System 36 mode, over that same architecture change.
:
: I'm not sure if that counts as a ported OS or not, and I do work for
: IBM, so I'll stop now...
Peanuts.
When my wife was working for Honeywell, in the 1980s, one of the
customers she had dealings with was British Telecom.
BT, at one location, had what they called the "orange Leos".
Now, for those who don't know this, the LEO was the world's first-ever
commercially-oriented machine (1951). Even more amazingly, the Lyons
Electronic Office was designed and built by the J Lyons company,
best-known as manufacturers of cakes and for their nationwide chain of
corner tea shops.
Anyway, an "orange Leo" was an ICL 2900 mainframe (they came in orange
cabinets), emulating an ICL 1900 mainframe, emulating a GEC System 4
mainframe emulating a LEO.
30+ year old executable code over 3 architecture changes....